Bibble Labs purchased by Corel

Pre-CES: Bibble Labs, the maker of the Bibble Pro Raw conversion software, has been purchased by Corel, maker of CorelDraw and PaintShop Pro. The announcement was made by Bibble President Jeff Stephens on the company's blog. According to Stephens' post, Bibble 5.2.3 is the last planned release of Bibble 5. The entire Bibble team has now joined Corel where they are working on developing of an image workflow solution based on Bibble technology. He says the company will continue to support both Mac and Linux. Bibble and Corel will be making an official announcement next week at CES.

Comments

I have Bibble light. I like it very much. However I'm not going to fork out more money for some added updates. Corel should be honoring the people who purchased licenses. Offering a $20 discount is stupid. For people that spent $100 for a program. I'll just keep what I have.

Hi everyone: I'm Jeff Stephens, previously the president of Bibble Labs and now I run product development for the new Corel AfterShot Pro. Yesterday was an exciting day for us, launching AfterShot Pro at CES. I hope this answers some of your questions about Corel's purchase of Bibble Labs and the new product. The Corel team is committed and are excited about our technology and processing power, and the opportunities we see to take the product forward. Corel is eager to invest even more in development and in bringing our technology to even more users -- something that Bibble Labs simply couldn’t afford to do on our own. All of us at Bibble have joined the Corel team. We're keeping Mac and Linux support. Thanks for your enthusiasm. I look forward to hearing your feedback.Jeff

Oh and it'd be nice if you guys listed what you do support in some obvious easy to find place so that people like me who are willing to give your product a try won't blow the one chance at a free trial period to look at the product only to find that our camera(s) are not supported.

I saw a comment from one of the people close to Bibble on Bibble forums that the upgrade (or sidewaysgrade ) price for Bibble 5 owners will be announced when the product is officially launched at CES this week and that it will be a lot better than the upgrade price shown on Corel's web site.

I personally think this is great for Bibble. Bibble can assume and inherit all of the good things of PSP. Once all the good stuff has been ported over to Bibble, they can simply get rid of PSP for the better version of Bibble.

Did somebody say Synergy? Suck, suck, suck! I hope this isn't the end of Bibble, as it has served me well, but I don't have high hopes for these people now having to work within a bigger corporate structure that will probably try to suppress their ideas.

Downloaded AfterShotPro from Corel, and in effect it seems pretty much the same as Bibble5, although without as many plugins.

I should imagine this is early days, let's hope it carries on getting better.

Perhaps Corel's biggest challenge is that they will need to get a lot more progress and evolution out the door before many people (myself include) will be convinced to invest in an upgrade....Corel, as noted by many in this thread, have a history of blind management and a reputation for killing good products.

I am a long term user of PSP. Recently my use has been decling because I no longer use windows, and running a 32 bit PSP in a virtual box is functional but a terrible waste of my 64 bit multi core processors power.

My workflow starts with Bibble 5 on Linux. I use a corrupt interpretation of the star system. 1 means delete, 2 keep but don't edit, 3 means edit in Bibble is sufficient, 4 means extra work in the Gimp, and 5 stars means that I will need to edit them using the VM. Then I output them to different folders.

You can infer from this that I still find PSP better for the most difficult PP tasks, but I try and avoid it!

So for me having PSP layered photo editing power in Linux along with Bibble RAW technology would be awesome....Roll it on.

Well, that should push RAW software development back 10 years.Corel will bury it, spend 2 years trying to implement the multi-coreengine into it's own stuff , fail and then give up.It certainly explains why no bug fixing has been done in the lasttwo years.Maybe, Stephens will release Bibble 4 to Open Source,it would ease some of the pain.

I've been a longtime user of Paint Shop Pro (Since it was owned by JASC). When they were bought by Corel the software suffered greatly, however, I believe they are on the right track with the last couple of releases. I prefer PSPx4 over Photoshop Essentials.

I have a Canon 60D and used DPP to edit RAW images. As a beta tester I used AfterShot before I knew it was formerly Bibble (I knew of Bibble, but never used it) I was really surprised how well I liked it. It does complement Paintshop Pro very well.

Buying Bibble was a good move for Corel. Hopefully Corel will continue to allow the folks at Bibble continue developing a nice piec of software.

I have just tried the new product. It's called Corel AfterShot Pro and it is very similar to B5. The new software costs £80 or £60 as an upgrade from B5, PSP, Lightroom and Aperture. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux (which I use) as B5 was.

That's fine as far as it stands but as a Fuji X100 user there is still the problem that it doesn't work with X100 raw files, though I note that PSP X5 does so there may be hope. One more point is that it can process DNG files according to the list on the product page.

I am a Lightroom user but I have used Corel since it first appeared in the early 1990s. Although PS5 is a better product, Corel is easier to use and the integration of the draw and photo package are hard to beat. It is very easy to create nice documents.

That said, Corel Photopaint is a dog when it comes to RAW. Corel needs an improvement. What is ironic is that Lightroom developed from a product called RAWshooter which was a giveaway with the Corel Graphics package (version 8 or so, as I recall).

sorry, but your last sentence is just not true:pixmantec's RAWshooter was aquired by adobe quite a while after launch of lightroom, and it didn't really contribute anything new to LRM, it's rather been a strategic move.

bibble on the other hand started out several years before adobe even realized that there'd be a market for such product..

markus7701, I was a RAWShooter Premium user, and subsequently, a Lightroom beta tester. Adobe acquired RAWShooter, then turned it into Lightroom. Adobe did not acquire RAWShooter "after" the release of Lightroom, but before, and yes, there were many contributions that RAWShooter made to the development of Lightroom, one being the Vibrance tool.

I just did a search on the CES site and neither Corel nor Bibble are going to have a booth at CES or the PMA part of CES. What a shame. Who makes announcements at a show an then doesn't have a floor presence?

To reinforce what has been said, I used to love the Micrografx Picture Publisher product until Corel bought it and then let it die. They claimed the "important" features were rolled into other products. I looked and found some in one Corel product and others in other Corel products and some in NO Corel products.

I too wish Adobe faced some serious competition. I now use Gimp and other open source products for most of my graphics/photo work.

I have just started looking into RawTherapee as a potential replacement once Bibble cannot be run any more under newer Linux versions and to my surprise, it has made quite some progress and appears to be quite usable except for some of the very special features in Bibble (layers, spot cloning etc.).

If the worst case scenario materialises and Bibble or any of its follow-up from Corel is discontinued, at least under Linux, and Bibble itself cannot be run any more, then RawTherapee might have matured enough to be a worthwhile replacement.

I hope I am wrong, but this story reminds me of Midland Bank in the UK before it was taken over by HSBC. The first candidate overtaker was Lloyds Bank, but the spin to make it seem like a merger was that the new entity would have one word each from the predecessors' names: Lloyds from Lloyds, and Bank from Midland.

I liked Bibble 5 enough to buy a copy. I wish Corel every success with the new product, on all operating systems. If I don't like it, they can whistle for my money.

Not selling Bibble 5 anymore seems like a mistake... This is a clear signal that the existing technology is dead. Companies who hire a new employee can't buy a new license.

Linux support is probably dead. That's what Corel did for WordPerfect -- they killed sdcorp, who developed a Linux version, made their own slow and buggy version, which didn't sell, and which was promptly killed.

Access to Corel's Q&A, UI, distribution, etc. teams won't help Bibble. Those teams all suck. Unless Corel plans to buy replacements for all of them too...

Only upside might be that we'll see some features Bibble was ideologically opposed to, but that were essential -- like DNG support.

i've been using Corel since CorelDraw 3 in 1992.What Corel did her was what Sony did for Minolta - xaved dying company,If it wasn't for Corel Painter wouldn't be around. And Quatro Pro? Very hard to compete with Microsoft even for OpenSoure. Open Office is not doing really great either.

This is not good news for Bibble users. I've been using Bibble since 2005.

If Corel turns out to be good for Bibble users, it will be a first for Corel. I have no confidence that Corel's ownership will result in a product as good as Bibble. Look what they did to Quattro Pro. Look what they did to <fill in the blank>.

I'll probably continue to use Bibble until someday down the line when I have a camera it doesn't support. Then it will be time to look for a replacement, and I doubt Corel's offering will be among the finalists.

Damon, I love your optimism but, sadly, I disagree.I used to be a Corel Draw user since 1992. They used to be really innovative, in both UI and features. However, they haven't done anything in the past 5 years or so. Even the Painter program, which they bought, they didn't really innovate much and now Adobe is bringing the same featues in Photoshop.

Corel is a company that is in survival mode. They just go on, and I would be sad to see them gone, but apparently they simply can't innovate anymore.

In contrast to most comments, I'm truly pleased with the news. Developing a top-flight raw converter and everything that goes with it takes serious resources. It's a testament to the Bibble developer's programming skills that they have managed to produce a converter that so efficiently uses the multiple cores of a modern CPU. That's an outstanding accomplishment. Is there any other raw converter that does so well in this respect?

Bibble has evolved hugely in the last decade or so on what I imagine to be limited resources, but like all complex software projects, has shortcomings and rough edges. I expect the product that emerges with Corel's help will be both more polished and have more useful features. I expect there to be more plugins, not less, and I expect they will improve in quality. I also expect that it will be a better marketed product. When I compare the marketing efforts of Bibble to Capture One for instance, it's obvious which product has far more $ behind it!

Did anyone else read Jeff’s post on the Bibble forum before making their comments? Anyway it appears that there will continue to be a Linux solution and that is good news, but you have to wonder how plugins will work. Speaking of plugins it will be really great to have an alternative to the Adobe solution. Being able to use some of the better masking solutions from “Paintshop pro” within the Bibble RAW editing world could be a really great solution. With the bigger development environment available to support the product, we should see a bigger memory mode and maybe GPU acceleration as well as floating windows for two monitor support. I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.

LightZone's not quite dead : www.LightZombie.orgAnd I disagree with the posts about Corel. Is there a better photo editing software out there for the price than PSP---which can often be had for $60? Is there a better paint program than Painter? None that I've seen...

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